Untitled
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: They came for her, as she had known they would since the moment she had spoken to the Old Man.Written for LJ's 15minute ficlet challenge. With a single word as inspiration, write a fic in 15 minutes and post it. Okay, so this took 20. Sue me. :P


They came for her, as she had known they would since the moment she had spoken to the Old Man. The marines came for her with their collar and their cuffs and their chains, and they reeked of their terror. Had the circumstances not been so desperate for them all, Sharon would have found this funny, that such large and well-armed men could be so frightened of _her_; the humans were all afraid of her, with the exception of Helo, and she would be eternally grateful to God for the gift of that one human and his love.

No one expected her to be human herself. Of course, she couldn't blame them for that. To them, she wasn't human, just as to her own kind she wasn't a Cylon. (That day in the forest on Caprica had changed everything, whether she had wanted it to or not.) They expected her to be a "toaster," a machine without feelings, without fears of her own. They wanted her to remove a Cylon logic bomb from the Galactica's computers, and she could do that. She could. But not the way they expected. They expected a machine to interface visibly with the Galactica, and their fear of her, their mistrust of her would only increase exponentially, and with it their fear and distrust of Helo, if they saw her work against the Cylon code without some visible interface.

By the time the pathetic, mismatched party reached CIC, Sharon knew what she had to do.

xxx

Her first glimpse of the people with whom she had once worked and played, and yet had never met or even seen before this emergency, was painful. On some of the familiar/strange faces was condemnation, on others indifference, and yet others… On others there was an almost instinctive welcome, quickly smothered. These, she knew, were the few of the command crew who had known her counterpart on more than just a surface level.

"We need to work quickly; we're on borrowed time," she told them. All of them were in danger, not just these humans, but, more importantly, herself and her baby. Sharon lifted her hands, reaching toward Lieutenant Gaeta, on whose face she saw that fleeting sympathy, but her arms were pulled up short. She looked at Commander Adama and again felt the familiar sting of his barely visible revulsion.

Still, he nodded. "Let her go."

One of the marines, his hands shaking ever so slightly, released the cuffs.

"Dee," Sharon said, looking over at the Petty Officer with whom she'd shared so many Triad games, "do you still carry your father's pocket knife?" She remembered Dee showing it to her one day, after they'd both dropped out of a game, leaving it to Starbuck and Ripper. At the look on Dee's face now, Sharon blinked hard, pushing the memory that wasn't really hers to the back of her mind.

"Give it to her," Adama ordered.

Sharon accepted the knife from Dee and looked over to Gaeta. "Mr. Gaeta, can you set me up with a fiber-optic com link? I need broadcast to all frequencies and direct link to the mainframe."

Again from Adama, "Do it."

She didn't need anything of the sort, though she would never let on to the others. Even as she used Dee's precious knife to cut into the skin of her palm – a spot that Helo frequently kissed when they made love – even as she accepted the cable from Gaeta and he slipped and called her "Sharon," she made the wireless connection through a hidden Cylon transponder. The code was there, waiting in its malevolence to do as much harm as it could to the Galactica and her humans.

The pain in her wrist, the warm blood that dripped to the gray deck, the metallic odor of that blood, all kept Sharon focused on what she had to do, helped her to bite back on her feelings, on her realization that she was finally committing treason for her baby and for the man that she loved.

She didn't know how long that frakking cable was stuck under her skin when she sent out a code of her own to the swarming Cylon raiders. She only knew that everything up to this moment in her life had been a lie. Not the life she knew from her borrowed memories, not the life she had known on Caprica and then Kobol with Helo, but the one she had lived before, as part of a larger entity, one that knew only numbers and code.

Whether the humans wanted her here on Galactica or not, Sharon Valerii had come home.


End file.
